Field trip to Lamas

In addition to working with children and youth in the town of Sauce, our UNESCO-affiliated organization Estrella del Sur also hosts a weekly afternoon crafts club for citizens over 60.  Last Friday we took the regular attendees comprising twenty ladies to Lamas, an historic town founded way back in Peruvian history in 1658.  Although only 2 hours away many of the women had never been there and they all really enjoyed the day out.
Highlights included a visit to a museum and crafts gallery where the amiable owner Sra. Nancy encouraged her visitors to dress up in the local native costume.  A stop at Lamas' unlikely Italian castle built recently by a business magnate from Italy, a tour of our friend Lisa's beautiful bio-dynamic horticulture operation, a descent down to el barrio wayku where quechua is still spoken and lunch at el mirador which is an elevated viewpoint where we could look out over the town and the valley beyond.
The day was a great success and encourages us to plan for another outing in the future.

Maiden voyage

Although just 2 hulls connected by wooden beams and without its deck, mast, sails and sunroofs we could not resist laying down a piece of plywood to make a temporary platform, hanging the 4-stroke (less polluting) outboard motor in its well and going for a cruise.
Although this boat is from the Huckleberry Finn school of funky boat design everything seemed to be working fine and holding together as we made our way around la laguna under motor power stopping at one beach for swimming and a game of frisbee and another to eat stuffed platanos.
On the return voyage to our dock the wind kicked up and it was exciting to imagine how this craft will be when we can raise the sails and turn off the motor using only the breeze for power.

A special thanks goes to ex-volunteer Hannes who was with us for a year back in 2007 when we lived near Cusco.  Back then he helped me teach woodcarving to youngsters and made the decision to enter a 3 year cabinet-making program on his return to Germany.  On graduation he crossed the Atlantic on a sailboat and worked for several months as a yacht carpenter in various Caribbean boatyards.  Now he is here in Sauce and has worked with me in our house under construction making this beautiful hand rail

and he has really helped me move the catamaran project forward using his carpentry and yachtsman knowhow.  The outboard motor at first did not want to start having been stored unused for almost 2 years, but finally Hannes gave the rope one last tug and it roared into life

Greetings from Sauce Peru

Lourdes and myself along with volunteers Christina, Corinna and Inti have been hard at work this month creating our new permanent headquarters for Estrella del Sur.  We have put in an enclosed garden, built an access bridge for the front and found funds to pay for local workers to build walls and start the roof.  Thanks again to friends who have contributed to this endeavor.

When finished this Waldorf-based  and UNESCO-recognized community education center will have one large classroom, two small multi-purpose rooms, a bathroom, outdoor covered kitchen and area for woodworking and other crafts.  The idea is for this center to act as a pilot project for bringing the Waldorf approach out into the developing world.  It is not a school, rather an after school enrichment program whereby children and teens can explore creative educational pursuits including arts, crafts as well as academic subjects that they do not receive in their public schooling.  We also host a weekly club for seniors which is very well attended as there is nothing similar in this community.

Now we are looking for funds to finish the project, an estimated $4000 US minimum.  Once we have this money we should be able to get the center up and running in about a month.  It will be great to move out of our present small building and into this much larger facility.  Please contact me at  martinstevens@juno.com  if you would like to donate to this project.

                                          Inti and friends start work on front access ramp

                                                   almost done......(you can't have too many drills!)

                          maestro Simon chops grass to mix with mud for walls of 'kincha'
                          traditional amazonian earthwall-building method

                          helpers apply mixture of mud and grass to prepared bamboo substrate

                              Christina and Corinna about to prepare our new garden for planting

Welcome to our new volunteers

Corinna, Christina and Inti have taken the courageous step of joining us for a year here in Sauce in the peruvian Amazon.  They will be helping us offer classes to children 3 - 16 years old in art, handicrafts, English and help with academic subjects as well as assisting with our construction and gardening projects.
So far they have all shown an affinity for our wonderful laguna, trying their hand at paddling our traditional dugout canoe, doing a lot of swimming and even jumping off a 15 meter high platform into the lake.  That's quite high folks, around 50 feet.

Señor Green

Here is Señor Green, he has a heart of gold and is the first one to arrive in Sauce.

Construction continues

Thanks to some kind donations from the UK and Germany we have been able to continue putting together the basic construction elements needed for our new permanent Estrella del Sur location.

We have built a wooden fence in back, a cement sidewalk (pavement) in the front and are well under way with walls for the bathroom which is to have hadicapped access.

Jungle catamaran update

I'd like to thank Andres Sergeant, mi sobrino (nephew), who came and helped out with our educational project for two weeks before heading up to see the wonders of Machu Picchu and thence on to the US and back to the UK to start his higher education at York university.  He also helped me and German Andres prepare these hulls for putting in the water which involved the gruelling task of putting in literally thousands of screws to mechanically attach areas where the fibergass had unglued during over a year in the tropical sun.  Then the screw heads had to be embedded in autobody putty and fresh gelcoat painted over.  Nasty but necessary work.

Launching day finally.  This involved 8 guys including don Alquelino the boat builder and his little hand trailer.

Wow!  They float!

 

 

 

Visiting our Shipibo friends

How a year flies by!  Now we are just about to say goodbye to our two young German volunteers who have done an excellent job receiving children and senior citizens at our Estrella del Sur educational outreach program and helping out in the local public school here in Sauce. Last month they went on an overland adventure by bus to Pucallpa which involved many hours of rough road travel and crossing a river on a makeshift ferry.
In Pucallpa they met up with Lourdes who had been in Cusco and together they went up the Ucayali river four hours in a typical amazonian riverboat to our small school project in the village of Ceilan.




 

Here's Freya doing traditional embroidery with Shipibo girls in the classroom we built two years back.

And here's Andres sliding down the creek bank with some boys.  Later he told me the Shipibo visit was the highlight of his time in Peru.  It's certainly a whole world apart, something increasingly rare in this time of advancing cultural uniformity.

Lourdes with Exhilde and Elias who founded Ceilan 35 years ago.  The embroidered designs reflect Shipibo culture's ongoing close connection with the world of the spirits.  These are stylized images of visions and songs perceived during traditional nighttime ceremonies.  Noya Rao is the name of the healing center in Ceilan where we have our 'escuelita' and is the most powerful, mysterious and elusive of the plant spirit allies in the pharmacology of Shipibo shamans.

WATERFALL!

Yesterday volunteers Andres, Freya, Andy and myself hiked to this waterfall only 30  minutes from my house.

Making a start

Three days ago we started the remodeling job on our new Waldorf-inspired community outreach center here in Sauce, Peru.  We are beginning with the necessary basics; new plumbing pipes and the foundation for what will be the bathroom.  Because of humidity concerns the bathroom is to be built of bricks but the rest of the planned structure that will comprise of a classroom, two bedrooms for our volunteers, kitchen and clothes washing area will be built of 'kincha', a traditional building material in this part of the Amazon basin that is essentially the same as the old English 'wattle and daub' whereby mud is applied to a woven wood matrix to make the walls.  It's a tried and true method that is eco-friendly, cheap and we like the soft aesthetics of the earth-tone finish.  These walls will be topped with the traditional palm-frond roofing.

Maestro Simon and helper putting in plumbing pipes and foundation for the bathroom.

We are making an effort to make the whole stucture wheelchair friendly as we plan to be able to accomodate both volunteers and community members with disabilities in the future.

An open letter

TO ALL GOOD-HEARTED CITIZENS OF PLANET EARTH.

The 21st century belongs to us. We the people. There are grounds for optimism, we are waking up.  They are few, we are many. And they are shaking in their boots, hence the increasing repression and mind-control.  Hanging on to an outmoded paradigm with bloody fingernails.  It's got to go, has to.  We are increasingly seeing through the Great Lie.  What is the Great Lie?

 Selling arms to both sides and posing as an angel of peace.

 Keeping an unjust economic system alive after it has clearly died.  Time to pull the plug.

 Pretending there is democracy while converting the system to a one party kleptocratic dictatorship.

 Emphasizing illness when it's health that we all want.

 Orwellian distortion:  War is peace, hate is love, bad is good, slavery is freedom etc.

 Lies after lies, you know what they are, fill in the blanks yourself........

It's time to build a whole new world based on values of mutual caring, equality and support for basic human needs, not control and cynical manipulation. Let's find a way to bring kind people to the fore and retire the psychopaths.  They have had their day.  And not just human needs either, support for all life forms in this amazing planetary ecology.

A perfect world?  Unlikely.  But it could be a whole lot better than this.  We are all individuals and we are mostly kind, good and caring.  We are all inherantly powerful and we all know there is something dreadfully wrong in our society.  For a start, it's all gotten way too big and bloated.  Time to downsize across the board.  There is enough for all, but heading for smaller units is generally the way towards fairness; ask anyone who has given the matter serious thought.

George Orwell said, look to the proles, and he was on the right track.  But I would say, look to the indigenous.  Terence McKenna talked about the archaic revival.  Yes, but it's got to be totally modern as well.  Modern but with some ancient essential understandings that are now being increasingly backed up by cutting-edge quantum physics:

  All is connected.

  All is conscious.

  We are each made of atoms.  Each atom contains mind-boggling power.  We are all
  tremendously powerful but mostly don't know it.

  This place is just one of many dimensions.

  Circles over hierarchies.

  We are eternal.  We came from somewhere and we go back.  Want to call it the Zero Point Field?       OK by me.  The Kingdom of Heaven?  The Void?  Nirvana?  Fine, whatever.


 The essence of all is love.


There is much to be done so we must proceed slowly  -  The Buddha

Thanks for all the help

Also the good wishes and positive feedback.

Heading to Germany

During the first week of June I'm off to Germany where I have been invited to attend a conference about volunteers.  I will also be visiting the offices of Freunde der Erziehungskunst Rudolf Steiners to talk about our Estrella del Sur projects in Peru and to thank them for helping us make the step of aquiring a building site for our new center in Sauce.  This help was in the form of an interest-free loan.  We are really happy to finally get a place of our own that we can shape into a very welcoming educational and social center for the community.

 Here are our volunteers from Germany, Andreas and Freya, in front of our newly aquired building site in Sauce.  It measures 11 meters wide by 20 meters deep and is one block away from the lake.  It is a different site than the one we first looked at back in February.  We had problems with the price which kept going up. The new site is just a few meters away and is better in that it has a large sports area behind it which will give the children more room to play.
We would like to thank our friends who responded to our appeal for help to buy a permanent home for Estrella del Sur.  Shortly we will start remodeling this traditional jungle-style building using funds kindly donated by various friends to double its size to create a classrom space.  We also plan to build two bedrooms for our volunteers, a bathroom with shower, a kichen and dining area, gardens, a playground and a covered area for woodworking and other crafts such as candlemaking.
We welcome visitors.
We also welcome the donation of more funds so we can complete our remodeling project.

We have recently started  Friday workshops for senior citizens 60 to 80 years old from 3-5 pm which is attended by 20 people.  We offer weaving, embroidery, knitting and other crafts.  We encourage participants to tell their personal stories and it has been interesting to find out more about 'the old days' when Sauce was a much more isolated place and there was a lot more magic.  Several report seeing mermaids in the lake when they were younger, also balls of fire, which is likely because the whole area is seismically active and it seems to have been more so in the past.  After a glass of fruit juice and a piece of cake the participants go off home happy.  This is the first such gathering offered in Sauce for older people.  Lourdes is glad to have all these new friends.

Help us buy our Waldorf community outreach building!

 When Lourdes (who is currently back in Cusco teaching a Waldorf education course to new teachers) and I first moved to Sauce some months back we were kindly lent this humble building with adobe walls and a dirt floor to use as a classroom for our Waldorf-based educational and community outreach program.
Recently the owner, who is the director of one of the local primary schools, told us that he has decided to put it up for sale.
Hey folks!  We'd like to buy it.  Can you help?
As they say, there are three important factors when buying real estate:  Location, location and location.  This building and adjoining garden space has all three.  Many people have expressed that Laguna Azul is one of the most beautiful spots in Peru and this property is one block back from the lakeshore.
Once we have become owners we can remodel and transform the structure into something much better for our purposes and make the garden into a beautiful play area for the children.
The lot is 300 square meters (about 900 sqare feet) and is selling for 40,000 Soles (Peru's national currency) which translates as $15,000 US at today's exchange rate.
We would love for anyone who would like to support the foundation of a new kind of Waldorf-based initiative, not a school, but a center for artistic and academic life enrichment for children and youth living close to the bottom on the social totem pole to come together and give us a hand to raise this amount.
Unfortunately there is the possibility the property will be sold to another buyer which would leave us looking for another place to start afresh.  That is not a scenario we want as we have already invested somewhat in painting the building, doing some repair work and putting in a new cement floor.  We would love to stay and make the place even better for the years to come.
We envision this as a pilot project which will hopefully provide a new model to inspire others to begin similar ventures in other communities.  The emphasis on arts and handwork is to engage the right hemisphere of the brain and provide some balance in worldwide education which increasingly only focuses on left brain processes.  The aim is to support the emergence of balanced human beings.
This project also provides a venue for young volunteers from the developed world to come and have a life-changing experience.
If you would like to make a donation large or small please contact me at  martinstevens@juno.com 
Thank you!

Sailing/rowing skiff

Steel rudder

Skiff with shallow-draft keel

Because I'm presently all wrapped up in building our house in Sauce I have had to put my large sailing catamaran project on hold temporarily.  In the meantime I had the notion to have a 17 foot wooden skiff built by a local boat builder which I would then adapt for sail and rowing.  So far I have added a shallow-draft keel with steel rudder to the bottom which I have also fiberglassed to prevent wood borers entering and then painted the exterior.

Home made oars

Next step will be to turn the boat over, paint the inside and fit out with seats, a tiller, mast, boom, oars and oarlocks.
It won't be winning any prizes for speed but rowing it will be good excercise and it should remain pretty flat when sailing in a blow.  Lots of weight below.....

Our new dock with renovated dugout canoe

Talking 2012 subterranean homesick blues

Lourdes and I were kindly invited to stay at the marvellous peruvian beach town of Huanchaco from Dec 26 until Jan 2 by our friends Dan and Donna Factor from Venice Beach California.  We generally had a great time but for some reason not entirely clear we all felt bummed out at the big moment of midnight Dec 31 2011 as we watched thousands of Peruvians celebrating the passing of the old year with fireworks and alcohol as pulsing techno-cumbia music filled the night.
Why did I feel so low, I asked myself the next day.
No conclusive answer came, except this:  I've had the year 2012 on my personal psychic radar screen since the mid 1980's when I read Jose Arguelles' 'The Mayan Factor' and later tuned in to the ravings of the late philosopher/celtic bard Terrance McKenna.  Something indefinable woke in me on the intuitive level  25 years ago that there was something stirring, a ripple in the cosmic fabric of the arc of time.  Perhaps humanity had reached a portal, a time-nexus, after which nothing would ever be the same again.
For what had I witnessed in my own brief stay on this planet but some kind of near-culmination of the historical process?  An acceleration during my own lifetime of unimaginable proportions in technology and corresponding changes in the collective human psyche. Perhaps a headlong rush towards oblivion.  Perhaps not.......
But maybe what I hadn't counted on was the continuation of banality.  Maybe my low state at midnight Dec 31 2011 was an unconscious reaction along the lines of, what? more of this crap, can't we get beyond techno-cumbia and beer as a species?  Time will tell on that one......